“Beyond Historical Awareness: 20-21st Century Japan-China relations” (Chikura-shobo, 2010)

Michihiko Kobayashi (Professor at the Center for Fundamental Education, the University of Kitakyushu)

Hiroshi Nakanihi (Professor, Graduate School of Law, Kyoto University)

It is our great honor to receive the Special Prize of the 27th Ohira Masayoshi Memorial Award. The honor is shared by all the thirteen authors who contributed articles to this editied volume, and on behalf of all the contributors, we as editors would like to send our gratitude to the directors of the Ohira Foundation, members of the steering and section committees, and those who generously assisted in publishing the book. It is beyond the space allowed to summarize each of the thirteen articles assembled in this volume. Here we would like to reiterate the thinking behind editing this book. It is a well-known fact that the so-called “history perception” issue is one of the major political concerns between Japan and China today. This issue revolves around the debate concerning the interpretation on Japan’s responsibility of war and violence to China and the much the same arguments have been repeated for a long time. No doubt the Japan-China relationship in the first half of the twentieth century was unfortunate, but it adds more misfortune if the historical interpretation puts the contemporary Japan-China relationship into a deadlock. The title of the book, “beyond the historical awareness” comes from this perception. Somewhat away from the politicized “history” controversy, there is an efflorescence of the highly academic, empirical and theoretical works on various aspects of the Japan-China relationship in the last century. It is of course a commendable academic development, but most of the work are naturally too specialized to have much impact on the popular history controversy. We, as editors, tried to find ways for this academic development to have positive effect on mitigating the history issue getting in the way of the Japan-China political relationship today, and this volume is our answer. Even though each article has its argument and academic agenda, by covering the century-long Japan-China relationship, we believe that the book has demonstrated twists and turns of the history and that both countries and people involved are much more active than generally perceived in terms of interaction with each other. It is not our intention to provide a grand-scale historical view over the Japan-China relationship in this volume. Rather, it is our hope that this volume stimulates further academic research in historical and political fields toward deeper and more multi-faceted understanding, thereby “weight of hitory” being overcome one day.

Profile
Michihiko Kobayashi, professor of political and diplomatic history at the Center for Fundamental Education, the University of Kitakyushu,　 since April 2007,was born in 1956 in Saitama Prefecture. He received his BA in Japanese history from the Department of History, Chuo University, Tokyo,in 1979 and an MA in the same subject in 1982. Between October 1992 and March 2007 he taught at the Law Faculty,the University of Kitakyushu, where he was appointed a professor in 1998.He received a PhD in modern Japanese history from the Graduate Faculty of Law of the Kyoto University in 1999. The Collapse of the Party Cabinets and the Manchurian Incident (Kyoto: Minerva 2009) (The Winner of The 2009 Yoshida Shigeru Prize).
Hiroshi　Nakanishi　 1985 BA Law Department, Kyoto University 1987 MA (Political Science) Graduate School of Law, Kyoto University 1988-90 Studied at the Doctoral course in the History Department, University of Chicago 1991 Associate Professor, Law Department, Kyoto University 2002 Professor, Graduate School of Law, Kyoto University 2006-2009 temporarily at the School of Government, Kyoto University